The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [109]
To Simon’s way of thinking, he’d pretty much eliminated any political motive for Blythe’s death. Both Stinson and Fritz, while having known about the affair, professed to have known that Hayward had made his decision to remain in office before Blythe died. Simon doubted that the fact that Hayward would have maintained his relationship with Blythe would have been a matter of concern to either man, and therefore it was not likely to have been an issue to anyone else from a political standpoint.
And so, Simon reasoned, perhaps they needed to start looking a little closer to home. Hayward’s home. And if, as Simon had begun to consider, one of the Haywards was behind Blythe’s death, he needed to narrow down that field quickly.
Dina’s life could very well depend on it.
Dina leaned her head back against the wall and gazed out through a broken windowpane at a starless night and tried to settle herself enough to focus on a way out of the dark, dirty shed. Outside, night creatures went about their nocturnal business, made their night sounds. From someplace very close by Dina heard an owl screech and, a moment later, the cry of its prey. She pressed her back into the wall and bit her bottom lip to keep from crying out. She was pretty sure her captor was gone, but just in case she was lurking outside, Dina didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing just how frightened she was.
Whistling in the dark, Jude called it.
Dina puckered up her lips and tried to do just that, but her lips were trembling with fear and she couldn’t do much more than hiss.
She’d used her feet to kick as much of the corn as she could reach into the far corner, and none too soon. There were sounds of increasing activity from that direction, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark she became aware of more and more vague shadows moving in the corner—nothing distinct, for which she was grateful. As long as the shapes were merely shadows, she could try to convince herself that they were something other than what she knew they really were. Kittens, for example, climbing over one another in play, rather than hungry rodents seeking a meal.
Something bumped her foot, and she banged her heel on the floor. There was a mad scurrying, then silence for a moment; then the tentative rustle from the corner began again. Moments later something climbed over her calf, and she shuddered, repulsed.
“Ugh!” she cried out.
Dina pulled her legs up as close to her body as she could and prayed that nothing else would decide to climb on her. What she’d give for that Swiss Army knife that hung from her key chain. That same key chain upon which she’d clipped the keys to Betsy’s Jeep before she carelessly tossed them into her purse—along with her cell phone—which she’d left on the front passenger seat.
Lot of good they do me now.
Jude had always insisted that you could get through anything so long as you kept your sense of humor, but it was becoming increasingly difficult.
Dina wondered if Jude had ever tested this theory by being locked in a small dirty space with little fresh air and lots of unfriendly, unpleasant furry creatures.
There was simply nothing funny about it.
There was another flurry of movement over near the corn and Dina poised to bang her heels, but the disruption stopped as suddenly as it started. She scootched into the corner to put as much distance between her body and the midnight snackers and rested her forehead against her knees—a most uncomfortable position, with her hands tied behind her back—and tried to convince herself that she was dreaming.
Maybe in the morning I’ll wake up in my bed back in the carriage house and find that none of this is true. It will all have been a dream, like that old Dallas episode. Jude will still be my mother and there will never have been anyone named Blythe Pierce.
It occurred to Dina that she never did ask Betsy where Blythe